Google to Encrypt Search Data – Killing off Organic Data

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Paul

So it begins, Google to kill off organic data to webmasters for logged in users, I won’t re-hash and rant as there are plenty of useful posts out there.

I will provide a quick summary though, the data is still there but Google only offering aggregated data through Webmaster Tools but as mentioned by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, it’s not that accurate. So begs the question is the data now being sent to webmasters useful?

So for more information on this topic here are a few useful posts:

Google Whores Out Users With False Privacy Claims – Joost de Valk on SEO Book
SEO Under Attack – The Google Analytics Keyword Data Apocalypse – Alan Bleiweiss on Search Engine Journal
Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search – Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land

Google Rolls Out Https Search For Logged In Users (ghacks.net)
Google to Limit Keyword Search Referral Data to Marketers (hubspot.com)

New Google Algo Update

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Paul

Quick post, it has been announced that a Google algorithm update is to happen in the US only for now but the recent Chrome block sites extension has helped identify 84% of blocked sites match in the algo.

What does this mean?

Potentially for UK SERPS in the future sites that may be marked as link selling or spam sites may have their external links discounted further and pass no weight.

No indication of the release in UK yet but keep an eye on your site or clients rankings as if the drop a cleanse if backlinks will be required.

Google site: only displays 3 significant digits

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Paul

Latest webmaster video from Matt Cutts explains that the site:domain search only shows 3 significant digits or pages indexed, for example if your site: query returns over a thousand pages then only the 1st 3 are indicative of the actual number.

Watch the video:

Ciao for now

Google Advanced Search Querystrings

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Paul

May not be teaching old dogs new tricks, but here is a quick post about utilising the querystring parameters in Google search. The Google search url is made up of a number of parameters, the & symbol is used to add parameters as shown in the following example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=football+world+cup&btnG=Search

hl=en – this defines the language. en is for English.
q=football+world+cup – this is the search query, the + is to replace spaces
btnG=Search - the ‘Google Search’ button was clicked to start the search

These are very basic parameter strings, now let’s take a look at how we can manipulate the result set coming back:

&num=100 – this will show the top 100 results instead of the default 10
&start=100 – this will allow the results to start from a particular position in the SERP’s

Now for a few advanced querystrings: as_qdr=x - Replace the x to one of the following to show when files had been first indexed:

d – last 24 hours
w – last 7 days
m – last month
y - last year
m2 – last number of months. m2 wlast 2 months m3, m4 etc etc

So just a few ways to manipulate the results in the Google, for a full list visit the SEOmoz ultimate guide.

Google Webmaster Verification Now Made Easier!

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Paul

Google have now made the Webmaster Verification process a lot simpler. If you own a site and want multiple people to be able to view the WMT information of your site, you would have had to add multiple html files or multiple meta tags which would make the process quite a lengthy one and also more difficult to manage.

Google are now sharing the verification love which allows Webmaster to simply add a user to the WMT account to view the profile, this has to be a Google account email addres.

Simply login to your webmaster tools account and select the verification details link.

Then click add user and enter the Google verified email address of who you wish to grant access to the WMT account for the domain:

The long and short of it means less hassle for Webmasters!

Google Product Search – Testing Links again?

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Paul

Has anyone noticed that the product results in Google have been showing images and not directly linkg through to the site?

A post from the Head of SEO at Latitude, Andy Heaps posted back in December about how Latitude joke about Google’s money making levers – “if profits are down or shareholders unhappy they pick a money generating lever and pull it” highlighted this, and now seems that the same is going on again.

Only today have Google displayed both links and none in their product listings here is the latest of my searches:

Google Products - No links

So does this mean that Google are “pulling the levers” again or trying to improve the users exprerience?

Google PageRank Update

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Paul

So it seems there has been a PageRank update this week, finally Organic Search SEO is a PR1 now!

Working on some SEO clients and happy to see that the one of my clients has seen the whole site go from PR2 to PR3.

Has anyone seen any surprising PR updates?

Canonical URL – A possible solution to duplicate content

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Paul

Duplicate Content Issues

The 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, have just announced a new tag that can tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page.

The issue websites have is duplicate content, the same content is indexed under different URL’s. This is an issue SEO’s have been trying to solve for a long time.

New canonical URL tag

To help solve this problem, the 3 major engines have declared that it will recognise a new HTML tag, which, if inserted into your web page, will allow you to specify which URL you want to be the “official”, URL for the content.

The tag needs to be inserted into the HEAD section of your web page:

HTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html">

XHTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html" />

This code needs to be placed in the HEAD section not in the BODY section.

Google will now count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL.

In summary, may be to early to tell if this will help webmasters as it was only announced on the 12th February 2009, but in my opinion this is handing back a little bit of control to the webmaster instead of letting the search engine’s figure out the correct URL.

Disclaimer: The tag is aonly a suggestion to the search engine. It will probably be used 99% of the time, but they have the right to handle things their way.

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress users now available from Joost de Valk.

Google PageRank Penalty given to Google

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Paul

It has come to light over the past week or so that Google.co.jp has been caught paying bloggers to write about them to help improve their hold in the Japanese market as Yahoo are strong in Japan.

Now, as we know Google does not like link buying and has penalized sites for doing this with search ranking penalties.

To my amazement and to be honest this made me giggle, they have given themselves a PageRank penalty for link buying!

The site was previously a PR9 and now is a PR5, I don’t think it will have any real effect but certainly won’t do them any harm.

Related articles

Duplicate Content Issues

New canonical URL tag